Gah, busy day! Professional Development co-presenting is fantastic for networking and seeing how the new Philosophy and Ethics course is progressing… but damn, it’s tiring.
Up at 5am to be ready to set up at 6am, then it’s no time for stage-fright as you’re zipping through the course so far, what will be and what the teachers want for support materials. I’ve got a lot of work on the website to get done and some fantastic new ideas on what teachers want. By the end of the day, I even got two job offers! Flattering and certainly giving me something to think about.
But – you’re not here for that. You’re here for the best blog-name I’ve seen yet – and one of the most impressive cases
of online investigative journalism this year!
“This is too clever to have been done by creationists.” But only Simon Owens of Bloggasm got the gurnsey on what the god-damn was going on in THAT PZ starring-singalong: ‘Mocking the Mockers: The Ambiguity of a YouTube Video’:
PZ Myers, a biology professor and vocal atheist who appears in “Beware the Believers,” received an email this week from a man named Michael Edmondson who outed himself as one of the creators. “The intent of the video has been questioned a lot,” he wrote. “…I suppose the answer is that I tried to make something that was funny to me and it’s not really meant to convince anyone of anything.”
What happened next? Owens writes:
I interviewed Edmondson this week and asked him how “Beware the Believers” came about. “Originally it was a six minute piece to be used within the film Expelled”… In the editing room for Expelled the production team decided the film had taken a different direction in tone than expected and that the unfinished animation no longer fit the film…”
Go on. GO to Bloggasm to learn more!
What intrigues me is how the artist appears to be saying that they want to somehow straddle the line between judging either one side or the other, but the eventual pastiche of images and lyrics still come across as mocking the attitudes of anti-Darwinists. It’s as if we’re seeing it through Stein’s eyes, with overblown-caricatures of scientists that are hilarious in their overhyped monstrousness. You just can’t take that view seriously and it instead turns to make such a Steinian-perspective petulant and quixotic.
Yet, as Owens’ investigation shows, it indeed has a commercially-orientated origin, made FOR the movie, not against. Does it indicate a natural tendency within satirical cartooning, towards revealing a more truthful picture despite the initially-biased intentions? I am reminded of the cartoons used in the documentary ‘Bowling For Columbine’, where the basic-cartooning-in-comparison Puritans tout absurdities about firearms that prompt the audience to see pro-gun lobbyists as simplistic and narrow-minded, although I can find it easy enough to reject the overall message by Michael Moore.
Perhaps there is something naturally pro-science that was accentuated with the detailed artifice of Edmondson’s animation and Chandler’s lyrics? The truth just got ‘outed’ because of the effort? It is certainly impressively constructed; as a piece on its own, without the relationship to the film that Owens has revealed on his blog, it still garnered a lot of attention and praise.
Oh, if you want to get into a little investigating of your own, I dug out this booklist to take with me to the workshop today – Secular Seasons have a brilliant list of suggested reading resources on a variety of topics, well-suited to help with the reasoning abilities of any ‘Stein’ you may find!
Happy reading of Bloggasm and books – oooh, and the latest and greatest Carnival of the Godless at No More Mr Nice Guy!
Don’t forget – Encephalon at Cognitive Daily – today!
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